On the Role of Side Information In Strategic Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores the fundamental limits of strategic communication in networks, focusing on how side information influences equilibrium strategies and costs in Gaussian settings with quadratic costs.

Contribution

It extends prior work to network settings, analyzing the impact of side information on equilibrium strategies and revealing the optimality of uncoded mappings in certain scenarios.

Findings

Side information can significantly alter equilibrium strategies.

Uncoded mappings are optimal in strategic source-channel coding networks.

The analysis characterizes equilibrium costs for Gaussian variables.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the fundamental limits of strate- gic communication in network settings. Strategic communication differs from the conventional communication paradigms in in- formation theory since it involves different objectives for the encoder and the decoder, which are aware of this mismatch and act accordingly. This leads to a Stackelberg game where both agents commit to their mappings ex-ante. Building on our prior work on the point-to-point setting, this paper studies the compression and communication problems with the receiver and/or transmitter side information setting. The equilibrium strategies and associated costs are characterized for the Gaussian variables with quadratic cost functions. Several questions on the benefit of side information in source and joint source-channel coding in such strategic settings are analyzed. Our analysis has uncovered an interesting result on optimality of uncoded mappings in strategic source-channel coding in networks.